JD
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser

Things Jeanne Says on Podcasts

“You have a little bit of the AI psychosis happening, where all of a sudden you'll see an AE who has built and owns soup-to-nuts a CRM, and you're like, I don't want you doing that. I want you selling… We cannot have people who don't understand permissions, auth, and security building things that do those tasks.” — Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Marketing Against The Grain “At the outset, we arguably let the agent take the wheel too much. We gave it full drafting rights, which we ended up pulling back on, because we realized, I don't really want Claude deciding my value prop.” — Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Marketing Against The Grain “From a marketing perspective, anytime we're shipping content, we ship a markdown version in LLMs.txt as well as a human readable version… we've actually changed the way that we develop product… anything you do needs to be exposed in the CLI and an MCP, the dashboard for those of us who are still looking at it. Basically, you're not ready to ship until you're available both to a human and to an agent.” — Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Marketing Against The Grain “If you go back to January, 3% of deployments on Vercel were triggered by an agent. It's now over 60% triggered by an agent… in 10 months… we talked about at Vercel, we basically had SLG, PLG, and FLG, framework-led growth… And now that FLG part has been replaced with what we call ALG, which is agent-led growth.” — Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Marketing Against The Grain

Where to Find Them

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser has been a guest on The Information's TITV (2 times) , The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors (2 times) , The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (2 times) , In Depth (2 times) , Grit , Marketing Against The Grain , SaaStr AI: How To Sell, Scale, and Win and Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth .

Recently: “How Vercel Uses AI Agents to Find Leads and Prep Sales Calls” on Marketing Against The Grain (November 2026); “SaaStr 885: Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO” on The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors (November 2026); “How Vercel Is Rethinking Go-to-Market With AI | COO Jeanne Grosser” on Grit (October 2026); “TITV One Year Anniversary Show” on The Information's TITV (July 2026); “Executive Function: Building systems that can make decisions without you | Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO, Vercel)” on In Depth (February 2026); “What world-class GTM looks like in 2026 | Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Vercel, Stripe, Google)” on Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth (November 2025).

What They Said

“You have a little bit of the AI psychosis happening, where all of a sudden you'll see an AE who has built and owns soup-to-nuts a CRM, and you're like, I don't want you doing that. I want you selling… We cannot have people who don't understand permissions, auth, and security building things that do those tasks.” — Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Marketing Against The Grain

Kieran Flanagan described sales reps building their own agent stacks that aren't connected to the right data and expose customer data. Vercel's COO says the company responded by having a dedicated go-to-market engineering team build the sanctioned tools.

Marketing Against The Grain · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
Marketing Against The Grain Around 36:01 into the episode
Speaker 2

…a solution that's now one of the top things that we're selling to enterprises, which basically lets you govern all of this otherwise ungoverned AI. Because we're often seeing the same agent basically get built 10 different times across 10 different AEs, which is not really that productive. That's

Kieran Flanagan

exactly what I'm doing.

Speaker 2

Yeah. And you just have, you have a little bit of like the AI psychosis happening where like all of a sudden you'll see an AE who's basically built their and owns soup to nuts CRM and you're like, well, I don't, I don't want you doing that. I want you selling, you know? They're like, I would love it if you would like, you know, give some requirements to the GTM Eng team. But again, like time in front of customers is like why you're here. And so we've now tried to like reel in a little bit of that, both in sort of like what you're actually able to access and build, because at the end of the day, supply chain risk is very real. And so we cannot have people who don't understand permissions, auth, and security building things that do those tasks. And that's why you've got a GTM Eng team, which is like a legitimate engineering team building sanctioned tools just like you would have bought them.

Kieran Flanagan

Yeah. Yeah. Very funny. Like that's similar types of experiences where you kind of shadow some sales reps and are like, look, I built my whole tech stack and I've built a whole army of agents that are going out and doing prospecting and they're not connected to the right data sources and they're…

Speaker 4

What I would tell them to start is in determining

Speaker 2

what you view to be

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“At the outset, we arguably let the agent take the wheel too much. We gave it full drafting rights, which we ended up pulling back on, because we realized, I don't really want Claude deciding my value prop.” — Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Marketing Against The Grain

Kieran Flanagan asked what worked and what didn't when Vercel built a prospecting agent. Vercel's COO says agents now do the research while carefully written templates carry the positioning.

Marketing Against The Grain · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
Marketing Against The Grain Around 02:15 into the episode
Speaker 2

Awesome. I'm thrilled to be here.

Kieran Flanagan

…but like prospecting agent, because I think you all have had a bunch of success there. You have a whole wealth of experience in selling as well. And I kind of just want to kind of ask what worked, what didn't work, and kind of what did you learn trying to instrument a prospecting agent at Vercel?

Speaker 2

At the outset, we arguably let the agent take the wheel too much. And so we sort of gave it full drafting rights, which we ended up pulling back on because we sort of realized like, I don't really want Claude deciding my value prop, right? Like

Kieran Flanagan

that's kind of

Speaker 2

my job as a go-to-market organization. And so we now intermix much more, let the agent do research, but let it then use templates that, you know, we just like classical, you know, sales and marketing, we have carefully crafted that ensure that we're capturing the right value prop and positioning…

Kieran Flanagan

Okay. So today it's a fully fledged prospecting agent. It qualifies your inbound demand, reaches out and tries to book a meeting with a rep. And a couple of the things you learned actually are pretty interesting in that you kind of didn't want AI deciding how to pitch. And so you kind of…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“From a marketing perspective, anytime we're shipping content, we ship a markdown version in LLMs.txt as well as a human readable version… we've actually changed the way that we develop product… anything you do needs to be exposed in the CLI and an MCP, the dashboard for those of us who are still looking at it. Basically, you're not ready to ship until you're available both to a human and to an agent.” — Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Marketing Against The Grain

Kieran Flanagan asked whether Vercel's marketing team looks different now that most demand comes from agents recommending the product. Vercel's COO says the team treats agents as first-class users, in content and in product development.

Marketing Against The Grain · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
Marketing Against The Grain Around 09:45 into the episode
Speaker 2

…good at that thing, but it's picking someone else. And then you can sort of figure out why it does that and then go back and figure out, okay, here's some of the stuff on that landing page or the pricing page that we need to clarify so that the agent can better understand the value of our offering.

Kieran Flanagan

…them. I'm trying to get them into my marketing funnel and then pass them over to sales. But now I'm like, well, I just have to make these agents recommend me. And it's a very different type. I don't know if your marketing team looks different because of that than what you've seen in the past.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean, partially because of what Vercell is, and I think partially because of how the market has moved, our marketing team is more technical, I would say, than your average marketing team. And one of the things I think that Vercel Uses effectively, both on the product side and also marketing, is truly to build for agents as a first-class citizen, I guess. So from a marketing perspective, anytime we're shipping content, we ship a markdown version in LLMs.txt as well as a human readable version. And so, you know, that's just become a default of like, you've got to do both. Similarly, we've actually changed the way that we develop product. And so we think about it as capability-driven product development. So instead of being like, okay, I'm going to make this thing available on a dashboard, well, that's great. But now only the humans can use that. Right. And so we think deeply about everything you do. It needs to be exposed in the CLI and an MCP, you know, the dashboard for those of us who are still looking at it, et cetera. But, you know, basically, you're not ready to ship until you're available both to a human and to an agent.

Kieran Flanagan

Yeah. So your marketing team is more technical, which makes a ton of sense because if you're going to have agents as a first-class buyer, you're going to have to do a bunch more kind of technical type of things. And does it change the way you think about sales? Because 70% or more are coming to the…

Speaker 2

So there are some ways, but I would say mostly no. So, you know, Vercel Uses to high-growth startups and Fortune 500 companies. And so when they arrive, a startup will still engage with because often they've gotten started with some aspect of Vercell, but they're not what we call wall-to-wall…

Kieran Flanagan

Yeah. Yeah. I think this is one of like always the gotchas with PLG. So I've spent so much of my career kind of doing advisory for PLG companies. And it all sounds great. And then you're kind of doing the PLG, then you do the light touch sales assist and then you go upmarket and go to enterprise.…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“If you go back to January, 3% of deployments on Vercel were triggered by an agent. It's now over 60% triggered by an agent… in 10 months… we talked about at Vercel, we basically had SLG, PLG, and FLG, framework-led growth… And now that FLG part has been replaced with what we call ALG, which is agent-led growth.” — Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Marketing Against The Grain

Kieran Flanagan asked how Vercel becomes the tool of choice for coding agents and how that changes everyone's job. Vercel's COO answers with the growth in agent-triggered deployments, then names the shift in how the company grows.

Marketing Against The Grain · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
Marketing Against The Grain Around 06:45 into the episode
Speaker 2

…So what we're trying to do is get our BDRs out. Of the business of email and more into the business of human interaction, right? And so, if we can get more of that research and email writing done by an agent where you're just approving it, then instead you can focus on doing the call after that.

Kieran Flanagan

…Lovable told me to use it, right? And I was building a project. And so I think half of your deployments come through coding agents. So I guess two questions. Number one, how do you become the tool of choice for these agents? And how do you think this fundamentally changes how we all do our jobs?

Speaker 2

So to your point, actually, if you go back to January, 3% of deployments on Vercell were triggered by an agent. It's now over 60% triggered by an agent. Crazy. You know, in 10 months. So it's truly crazy. And I think that's a result of a number of things. One, somewhat unique to Vercel is our investment in open source. So actually, before agents came around, we talked about at Vercel, we basically had SLG, PLG, and FLG, framework-led growth, which is folks use Next.js, they now use eBar agent framework, and you can or cannot choose to use Vercell software. But obviously, folks who have used our framework might be more likely to then go use Vercel to deploy that software. And then now, sort of that FLG part has been replaced with what we call ALG, which is agent-led growth. I think some of the reasons that we end up doing well in…

Kieran Flanagan

It's pretty incredible. So I think there's another stat. You can correct it if I'm wrong, but I think your ChatGPT sign-ups went from 1% to 10%. And if that number is true and you're 3% to 60% on these kind of AI code and agents recommending Vercel, 70% of your business is coming from agents…

Speaker 2

We pay a ton of attention to it and there's a lot of work to actually maintain your relevance, which again goes back to the content front. I mean, another example is the breadth of Vercell's product offering has increased dramatically this year. So Vercel is now really a full stack agentic…

Kieran Flanagan

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Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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